Monday, March 12, 2012

[the 'new washing miracle' was the agent that saved the day at Daytona after Juan Pablo Montoya's unfortunate run-in with 200 gallons of jet fuel]

If
you are a regular reader of this blog then you are probably already a huge
NASCAR fan, in which case you have no need of our recounting of the events from
the recent Daytona 500. However, in case
you are unaware, the race was spectacularly marred when driver Juan Pablo
Montoya’s #42 car careened out of control and in to the back of a jet-dryer safety
truck, igniting 200 gallons of jet fuel.
Amazingly no one was seriously hurt. The
crash was a source of high drama however.
As you may have guessed, jet fuel burns extremely hot and is difficult
to extinguish, properties which pose an imminent threat to asphalt paving. The banked turns of Daytona are pitched so
steeply- 31 degrees- that the surface was in danger of undergoing bituminous
liquefaction and oozing down the turn into the infield. Fire crews eventually took to dousing the
blaze with the “new washing miracle”- Tide
detergent and the race was able to restart, despite the newly created rough strip.

That
got us thinking- how in the world would one pave a turn banked at 31
degrees? Stock cars use momentum to stay
high in those turns and sling around them.
But a paver-roller would just topple over on its side as it tried to
slowly creep along with its high center of gravity. It turns out the construction of the banked
speedway turns is a fascinating story involving highly specific techniques and
strategies. To
build the high banked turns in the flat Daytona topography millions of tons of
gravel were excavated from a borrow pit n the center of the oval, creating what
today is known as Lake Lloyd. Once the turns
were built up, paver rollers were anchored to bulldozers set on top of the
banks, creating a sort of gravel-asphalt-paver-roller-spelunking
assemblage. The construction specifics
of this landscape, and mega-stadia in general, begs the question: what could landscape architects bring to this
situation, and why aren’t they traditionally involved?

[repelling paving equipment on the 31-degrees banked turn at Daytona is fed with material by a crane-conveyor from below and anchored from above by a bulldozer with some kind of adjustable side arm]

Granted,
a landscape architect may often have some role in the site planning of the
parking lot, or in helping fit the edges to urban adjacencies. But at a smaller scale such as a city park we
would also be involved in the actual construction of the field, in deciding
where the excavation should come from, or how steep specific slopes should
be. There is a tradition with the field
of designing the interior objects of the landscape which somehow gets lots past
a certain scale.

There
seems to be two thresholds at play, either of which serves to filter out the
landscape architect: a machine-threshold, and a program-threshold. When the machines of operation get too big,
or when the program gets too specific, the role of the landscape architect in
creating the landscape architecture shifts dramatically. It is not just a question of specialization-
looking to a specialist for key decisions- because this also could happen in
design a constructed wetland, or in collaboration with an artist in design a
plaza. Rather, it is one of relegation-
the landscape architect begins to concern themselves with the aesthetic experience
of entry sequences and other bit parts.
Perhaps this is as simple as the profession remaining narrowly focused
on the propagation of 19th century landscape typologies. We would suggest however, that a bigger
factor is the lack of instrumental theory in the field. It seems that only in the last 20 years have
we rediscovered an interest in developing the tools to add real value to the
creation of these other landscape types.

Whatever
the case, we have a soft spot for these landscapes. And not just because we love “hot, nasty,
badass speed”, but because they are technologically and socially important
landscapes that traditionally have little space for landscape architecture as
traditionally practiced. These important
projects at the margins of practice offer the chance for testing the boundaries
of landscape practice. One might imagine
a history/theory course that looks exclusively to stadia to recount an
alternative history of landscape practice.
Beginning with Elysian Fields in Hoboken instead of Manhattan’s CentralPark, a parallel history of landscape practice might be examined with further
insights into economics, nationalism, instrumentality as social and material
practices, resource extraction, and structures of meaning. Guest lectures would include Brian Katen onthe lost racing ovals of Virginia, Rob Holmes and Michel Serres on soccer landscapes and the theory of the quasi-object, Nate Berg and WrightThompson on the social construction of Brazilian soccer, and Diego Maradona on a
new method of constructing landscape he calls:
“a line of coke and an ungodly run through the whole of the English
backfield”.

Sign
us up.

[Daytona Speedway and International Airport coexist side by side; the lighting system installed at the Speedway in 1998 to run night races had to designed not to interfere with planes landing at the airport]